So three flights and 36 hours later, we meandered through the base to their command center - which had the feel of a giant man cave. One of them is Kadena, a county-sized USAF base that houses the 353rd Special Tactics Group. So instead of flying off to meet one of the rescue effort’s European divers, we flew from Bilbao to Munich to Tokyo, and finally to the Japanese Island of Okinawa –- which decades after World War II continues to bristle with U.S. Taking Mallinson’s cue, our ABC News 20/20 team set our sights on Okinawa. USAF 353rd Special Tactics Group: Human Swiss Army Knives It would take nearly two months of additional reporting to grasp how close to death some of the boys came when the divers hauled them out of the cave one by one, as detailed in the book. If the boys regained consciousness - they might have panicked – which could have been potentially fatal for both the boys and the divers. We learned that the Thai Navy Seal divers were not the lead –- that they were not part of the diving portion of the rescue at all that Mallinson and the other divers had to sedate and re-sedate the boys repeatedly during the perilous rescue operation. The extraction began on July 8th and lasted through July 10th. But as I learned in my reporting, just days before another major monsoon threatened to close off the cave for months, a USAF Special Tactics team on the ground managed to convince the Thai government to green light a dive rescue. The Thai government had worked hard and been willing to try anything to extract them –- finding an as-yet undiscovered alternate entrance to the cave lower the water table of the entire region by pumping out lakes-worth of water, drilling a 1500 foot relief shaft to them creating a torturously-long oxygen pumping system to provide them air.Īnything but a dive extraction – which everyone considered too dangerous. It was only ten days later on July 2nd that British divers John Vollanthen and Rick Stanton would find them. The boys had ventured into the cave for a team-building exercise on June 23rd. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by survival. This was an assignment that resonated with me. He had graciously made that pit stop in northern Spain for us. Yes, the man who’d spent days nearly two miles deep inside a submerged mountain cave - diving boys to safety, suffering blisters and infections - was going cave diving again. It was only a week after the rescues were completed, but Mallinson was heading south to Spain’s cave diving country on vacation. He’d driven his van filled with customized diving gear from Yorkshire, England, and had I flown the 6,000 miles from Los Angeles (via Madrid) for ABC News' first opportunity to interview one of the four main divers who physically swam the Thai soccer team to safety. Mallinson and I met in a cheerless airport hotel in Bilbao for a breakfast of stale rolls and hard boiled eggs. It’s why I ended up writing a book about this extraordinary, odds-defying rescue. When I rendezvoused with Jason Mallinson in Bilbao Spain, I knew only how little I knew.īut what I was about to learn about the globe-gripping rescue of a Thai soccer team from a flooded cave last summer still remains little-known among the general public.
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